Movie theater owners need variances for planned expansion

Owners of Eastern N.C. Cinemas are planning to expand New Bern’s Bear Town Cinema Six to 10 screens.

Eddie Fitzgerald, Sun Journal Staff

Owners of Eastern N.C. Cinemas are planning to expand New Bern’s Bear Town Cinema Six to 10 screens.

Mitchell Brydge, Robin Strickland and Mark Hartman, owners of Eastern N.C. Cinemas, were hoping to get a variance from the New Bern Board of Adjustment Monday night to work on the property. But the board lacked a quorum and the meeting was rescheduled.

Bernard George, New Bern land and community development administrator, said the owners were asking for three variances on setbacks, planting/buffering and parking.

The location of Bear Town Cinema Six on Trent Road is in one of the five city entranceway design corridors that require stringent regulations, George said.

Brydge, who is also the owner of Brydge & Lee Inc., a contracting business that will do the expansion, said they were asking for a variance on the setback regulation that prohibits building on property 50 feet from the roadway.

The variance would allow Brydge to build an 11,000-square-foot addition to the 18,000-square-foot theater, enough space to add four more screens, he said.

Brydge said they also asked for relief from the rule that 60 percent of the front of property abutting Trent Road must be planted. That would affect parking, Brydge said.

“We want to landscape and plant appropriately,” he said.

If the Board of Adjustment allows the variances, Brydge said the next step will be to apply for the building permit and storm water plan.

Construction on the expansion could begin Jan. 1 and be completed by May 2013.

The addition will include state-of-the-art digital projectors, stadium seating and upgraded seats for the audience, Brydge said.

BB&T is financing the expansion and C.R. Francis, a local architect, is designing the new building, he said.

“It’s going to be really nice,” Brydge said.

The expansion will seat an additional 600 moviegoers, giving Bear Town Cinema Six a seating capacity of 1,600, he said.

The four new projectors will cost about $300,000, which will be reimbursed by movie studios, Brydge said. Movie studios are already paying Bear Town Cinema about $5,000 per month for the next seven years to cover the renovations that upgraded four projectors to digital in July, he said.

Until recently studios paid theaters “virtual print fees” to upgrade to digital because it is much cheaper shipping hard drives instead of 33 millimeter film, Brydge said, adding he was spending $1,000 a month in film shipping fees.

“If the money was not available, we would not be pushing to do the addition so hard,” he said. “We would have eventually gone digital. But I don’t know how long that would have taken.”

The studios no longer offer the virtual print fees. Bear Town Cinema Six was one of the last theaters to acquire the funding, and to get it for the expansion, the new theaters have to be completed by May, Brydge said.

Bear Town Theater has been totally renovated from the parking lot to the seats, including a new generator that could run the theater and expanded area, allowing people to get a cold drink and watch a movie even if city power goes out, Brydge said.

“It is as close to being a brand new theater as it can get,” he said. “That is what people want.”

Bear Town Cinema Six spent $850,000 on the renovations. Half was for the building itself, Brydge said.

Brydge said he didn’t see any problems filling the additional space with moviegoers.

“I think we’ll do fine with it,” he said.

Sometime in the future, after the expansion is complete, Brydge said they may try to have the property rezoned to build a restaurant next to the theater.

Eddie Fitzgerald can be reached at 252-635-5675 or at eddie.fitzgerald@newbernsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @staffwriter3.

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